Gordon-Levitt out to save himself in 'Looper'

If an actor's face is his fortune, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is rolling the dice, big time. "Looper," the sci-fi time-travel extravaganza that opened Friday, stars Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Jeff Daniels, Paul Dano, Piper Perabo and ... who's the guy on the movie poster?

JOHN ANDERSON

If an actor's face is his fortune, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is rolling the dice, big time. "Looper," the sci-fi time-travel extravaganza that opened Friday, stars Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Jeff Daniels, Paul Dano, Piper Perabo and ... who's the guy on the movie poster?

It's Gordon-Levitt — looking slightly more recognizable than he is in the movie, directed by Rian Johnson and in which Gordon-Levitt plays Joe Simmons, a hit man — or "looper" — for the mob, circa 2044. Time travel isn't possible in Joe's time, but it is in 2072, when gangsters send their victims back in time to be rubbed out by the likes of Joe, thus creating the perfect disposal system for unwanted wise guys.

In Johnson's script, the wrinkle is that, at some point, one's victim can very well be one's self — as it is with Joe, who is supposed to kill his older version (Willis) but lets him get away ("letting his loop run"). He thus has to chase himself through the movie lest the mob chief from the future (Daniels) have the younger Joe knocked off instead. Confusing? Not really. "I didn't want it to be algebra homework," Johnson said.

But if the face Gordon-Levitt is wearing seems disconcertingly familiar, it's supposed to be: Under the prosthetics and behind the evocative voice, Gordon-Levitt is impersonating a young Willis — at least as imagined by the filmmakers and the leading man. At the Toronto International Film Festival, where "Looper" premiered two weeks ago, Gordon-Levitt was asked whether Willis — who seemed to be movie-starring all over town — had met him halfway. The answer was, not really.

"Well, I feel like it's proper for the younger man to defer to his senior," Gordon-Levitt said, "and someone as accomplished and fantastic as Bruce is."

Besides, said Gordon-Levitt, who starred this summer in "The Dark Knight Rises," Johnson gave him the kind of opportunity he likes: a chance to disappear.

"That's my favorite thing to do as an actor," he said. "To become somebody else. My favorite performances are always the ones where you don't see the actor, you see the performance. So to say I disappear into the movie is the highest compliment."

Besides, his director said, Gordon-Levitt "is sort of a leading man with the soul of a character actor. He loves vanishing into parts. This was an opportunity to literally do that."

Johnson and Gordon-Levitt first worked together on "Brick," which became a cult hit for the way it transplanted a film-noir aesthetic and hard-boiled dialogue to a high-school milieu. That film came out in 2003, and, ever since, Johnson and Gordon-Levitt have been talking about "Looper."

"I had written a script for a short film I never ended up making," Johnson said in Toronto. "It was supposed to be shot in a weekend in L.A. on a video camera, and we never did it. But after 'Brothers Bloom,' I dusted it off and thought of some bigger themes to expand it."

The insistence on real things happening to an actor — rather than, say, in a movie like "Transformers," where an actor has to stand against a green screen and imagine a 30-story monster coming at him — is a huge benefit to a performance, Gordon-Levitt said.

"I guess if you're acting against a green screen and having to make things up, that's an intriguing challenge, too," he said. "But if you're trying to do a realistic and grounded drama, you want to really be there."

Gordon-Levitt's makeup, as extraordinary as it is, may not be the most-discussed issue generated by "Looper," which has among its plot points the murder of children, something the movies once considered absolutely taboo.

"What's the quote from Hitchcock?" Johnson asked. "He did an interview where he said his biggest mistake in 'Sabotage' was killing the kid with the bomb on the bus. He said, 'The audience never forgave me for that and I lost them for the rest of the movie.'